


love is patient : love is kind

by friedgalaxies



Category: Naruto
Genre: Adoption, Families of Choice, Gen, M/M, Orphans, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26244646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friedgalaxies/pseuds/friedgalaxies
Summary: It’s seven in the evening, Raidou Namiashi has just gotten off his jounin shift, and there are two more kids in his apartment than there were when he left this morning.
Relationships: Hagane Kotetsu & Kamizuki Izumo, Hagane Kotetsu & Kamizuki Izumo & Shiranui Genma, Namiashi Raidou/Shiranui Genma, Shiranui Genma & Umino Iruka
Comments: 4
Kudos: 52





	love is patient : love is kind

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS for: mentioned/alluded to sexual assault, death of a parent, and bigoted attitudes towards sex workers

It’s seven in the evening, Raidou Namiashi has just gotten off his jounin shift, and there are two more kids in his apartment than there were when he left this morning.

A scruffy brunette, maybe thirteen or fourteen, and a shy-looking black haired kid that has to be the same age are sitting on his couch, staring at him over the back of it like he’s a wild animal about to attack them. Which, considering he just got off ten hours of running missions and there are heavy paper bags hanging from his hands and he feels just about dead on his feet, he just might. Raidou considers himself a patient man-- which he has to be dealing with his partner who never stops diverting the conversation with sly jokes and distracting smirks long enough to have a serious talk about the issues he keeps burying and the thirteen-year-old orphan he dug out of the rubble of the Kyuubi attack-- but he’s this close to screaming.

“Genma?” he just-below-shouted into the apartment, where Genma was surely hiding after squirreling away his latest acquisitions-- i.e., the children that were undoubtedly orphans sitting on their couch and wearing-- was that Raidou’s shirt?

“Yes, dear?” Genma called back, bandana-clad head popping out through the doorway of the kitchen and, oh, that was the pet name he always used when he’d done something he really, really didn’t want Raidou to be upset about. Raidou groaned internally, shuffling to their cramped little kitchen where Iruka was puttering about the stove, intermittently stirring at a deep pot and shifting around the contents of a wok with a wooden spatula. Raidou lifted his arms with what felt like a herculean effort, of which Genma, lovely, sweet Genma, quickly divested him of the groceries in them and set about putting the contents of the bags away in their proper places in the fridge.

Raidou collapsed into one of their kitchen chairs, trying in vain not to notice that there had been another added to their mismatched set of four. He dragged a hand down his face, already dreading the answer to the question he had yet to voice. “Why are there two more strange children in our living room?”

Genma hummed, running a hand through the hair at the nape of Raidou’s neck, “They didn’t have anywhere else to stay.”

And even though Genma was fixing him with that look that meant this warranted no argument, Raidou wouldn’t have found solace with himself if he didn’t at least try. “But our apartment--”

“Has plenty enough space if we move those boxes out of the guest room.” Genma hummed, scratching blunt nails across the base of his partner’s scalp. Iruka looked as though he was trying in vain not to peek at the two men who had become something of his guardians, dutifully keeping their dinner from burning while said guardians debated.

Well, “debate” was a strong word for the kind of conversations Raidou and Genma had when it came to topics like this. It was more like Raidou voiced his concerns, Genma immediately shot him down with assurances and the unspoken promises of wonderful favors if he complied, and Raidou acquiesced while silently reworking their budget in his mind. Genma simply had a penchant for doing what he wanted without Raidou’s knowledge and then using every trick in the book to make sure Raidou agreed with him, even though it took very little for Raidou to agree with his husband. They knew each other well, and they both knew Genma would never make life-altering decisions that his partner would truly disagree with, as much as he would gripe about it at first. Love is patient, after all.

Raidou groaned, leaning into the touch, blinking his working eye up at his husband. Genma leaned forward just long enough to place a gentle kiss on Raidou’s forehead, the toughened, ropy tissue of his scar unfeeling where his tawny brown hair brushed against his face, though it tickled his lips and the tip of his nose. Genma grinned down at him, with that ever-present senbon in the corner of his mouth like a rich man with a cigar, and Raidou knew that whatever plan the other man had, it would undoubtedly work out. Somewhere behind them, Iruka made a fake-disgusted noise. Genma stuck his tongue out at the surly teenager, who mirrored the motion in return.

But for now, Raidou was tired, and even through the grumbling of his stomach all he wanted was a bath and to collapse into their bed.

“Gonna stick around for dinner?” Genma asked, returning to his duties of putting away the groceries. He made a nice picture of a dutiful little househusband, Raidou thought. But Genma would sooner put a senbon through the eye of whoever voiced that notion than they could see the pretty flush high on his cheeks, so Raidou kept the mental image of Genma in a frilly apron with flour dusted over his nose to himself (for now.)

Raidou dragged his hands, tired and calloused and aching in the joints, through his mess of sweaty hair, undoubtedly making it stick up in even more wayward spikes than usual. He stood with a creak, undoing the buckles of his jounin vest with practiced movements and shucking it onto the hook by the door as he passed it. “No, too tired. Gonna bathe, then sleep.”

Genma hummed in acknowledgement. “Want help in there?”

On another day, that might’ve been an invitation for something much more fun than soap and bubbles, but Raidou was too tired to do much of anything but run robotically through the movements of his evening routine and fall face-first into bed. “Nah, I got it. You have dinner with the kids.”

He didn’t have to turn around to know Genma was smiling.

Raidou took a pit stop by their bedroom before moving into the bathroom that was definitely too small for their growing family. He made a mental note to start looking for bigger apartments (didn’t Aoba and Anko say something about openings in their building at the bar last week? Oh, Kami, they weren’t going to be able to have bar nights again for a while, were they, not with their growing gaggle of children--) before shucking off his dirty jounin blues onto the bathroom floor before sighing and putting them in the hamper proper.

The water, just this side of hot enough to burn some feeling back into his skin through the crust of blood and dirt, was a much needed balm on his sore muscles. He could almost imagine how nice Genma’s hands would’ve felt working the knots out of his shoulders and neck, kneading into the knots of scar tissue that lined the left side of his neck and kept his muscles constantly tense. But Genma was busy with the kids, undoubtedly finishing dinner and trying to herd three barely-teenagers into their seats around the kitchen table and have a decent meal (that Raidou was also missing out on, disappointingly.)

He worked the shampoo through his hair with what was probably a touch too much force, scrubbing his skin down with his designated washrag till it turned pink, swirls of red and black and brown eeking down into the drain. He didn’t much have the energy to work through the stretches his physical therapist prescribed to keep the muscles in his burn scar from going completely tense, though he hadn’t been doing those seriously since the months after he first got burnt, so he just slathered an extra handful of lotion over the scar and called it a day. The medi-nins could yell at him over the reduced motion in his face the next time he inevitably ended up in the hospital for a post-mission visit.

When Raidou next awoke, after running through the motions of bathing and changing into sleep clothes as fast as he could and then collapsing into bed, it was to Genma settling into the covers next to him. Raidou grumbled, shifting closer to wrap an arm around the other’s waist and draw him close, burying his face into the familiar warmth of Genma’s chest. Thin, practiced fingers scratched at the back of his head in the way Genma knew he liked, tracing patterns against his scalp.

“Kids good?” Raidou asked, though it came out more muffled than not. Genma chuckled softly, and there was the quiet sound of metal against wood as he set his ever-present senbon on the nightstand.

“Yeah. Ate like someone was gonna take their food away even after I told them to slow down. The bigger one-- Kotetsu, he’s got the mess of brown hair-- he got sick and Iruka helped him to bed while I cleaned up.” A deep sigh, and Genma threaded the short, bristly fibers of Raidou’s hair through his fingers and tugged, lightly. “You’d think tonight were their last hours together, or somethin’. They’re practically attached at the hip.”

“Sounds like some people I know.” Raidou mustered up enough energy to roll onto the back of his shoulder, blinking blearily up at Genma’s jaw. Genma turned to face him in the darkness, gentle brown waves splayed across his cheek, across the pale cotton of his pillow. Their pillows.

“You’re beautiful,” Raidou breathed, and even though it was dark he knew it to be true. Genma was radiant, in an understated way. He’d often been described as plain, but ever since the first time he saw him Raidou had been unable to get the other man’s face out of his mind. The high, wide curve of his cheekbones and broad, aristocratic nose. Deep, dark, sleepy almost brown eyes that turned down at the outer corners and soft, slightly chapped, pouty lips always grinning, always with a senbon trapped between his teeth. He had a slight scar that ran over his upper lip, razor thin and just as straight, almost parallel to his nose. Raidou always wondered where he got that scar.

Genma smirked through the darkness of their bedroom, smoothing Raidou’s bangs away from his forehead. “You tryin’ to talk me into bed, handsome?”

“Fuck no.” Raidou grunted, turning to wedge his face back in between the curve of Genma’s pectorals. “Too tired.”

Genma is sitting on the edge of their bed the next morning, half-dressed and staring into the distance. Raidou stretched slowly, languidly behind him, nudging his thigh through the blankets as he did so. It was best to approach Genma gently when he was like this, because one never knew what kind of headspace he was in when he started staring off into nothing, whether he was caught in the throes of trying in vain to perform the Hiraishin fast enough to catch up with Minato and arriving just in time to see him fall on his own metaphorical sword, or if he was just swamped in the alluring ire of better times, before they truly knew what it meant to be too late.

Genma turned to face him over his shoulder, blinking blearily a few times before he seemed to fully register Raidou was there. He grinned gently, privately, something saved for between the two of them or their closest friends, people who were closer to family than not. Something preserved only for him, and Iruka, and the rest of the tokubetsu jounin they called family. The people he’d drop everything to help, would give his entire life to save; though sometimes that didn’t mean much, considering Genma was so full of love for other people that Raidou was surprised the world hadn’t drained it all out of him by now.

Genma tried hard to be callous, to adopt a cool affectation, to appear almost lazy, uncaring. But Raidou knew his husband, and he knew Genma had adopted that placid, unaffected manner that everyone seemed to associate with him these days as a coping mechanism as a young child.

The Shiranui were poison specialists. They excelled in anything explosive and deadly, and had enough poisons to down an entire army stashed in their homes, up their sleeves, in their socks and in the pockets of their chuunin and jounin vests, at any given time. But beyond that, the Shiranui were specialists in seduction, something of a fine art that had slowly started dying out over the years. Genma had told him how his great-great-great-great many-times-great grandmother had started out as a prostitute, a lady of the night who had taken up alchemy under an apothecary as a way to ensure her safety while working. And from there, she had had a certain aptitude to poisons that had made a hidden village take her in when she had nowhere else to go. And then her children had had the same aptitude for poisons, and had become shinobi, and learned how to combine their poisons with timed seal releases to create gaseous bombs. And the rest was history.

Shiranui. Unknown fire. Demon lights, bobbing along the darkness of a trail and guiding lost travellers to their sure doom. A pale shoulder where a kimono slipped off, leading men with greed in their pockets and blood on their hands to a bed where they would die, lips turning blue and choking on their own saliva. A blue seal, light in the darkness of a sewer ticking down by the seconds till it would explode and flood poisoned air into the home of a corrupt government official. They took any job they could get their hands on, scrabbled at money to protect their own, and kept their lips shut tight. Genma told him the Shiranui were great at keeping secrets, as any courtesan was.

But Genma (and his sisters and mother and grandmother and great grandmother and-) had grown up not so much outright hated as feared, and shunned because of the fear, under the guise that parents didn’t want their children catching sex-borne illnesses that Genma’s mother and grandmother and every mother before her never had, never would have. Perhaps that was why Genma found himself taking in strays off the street so much, starting with Raidou and working all the way to the grungy little boys that slept in their guest room right this very moment. Perhaps that was why Genma took up his cool, unaffected matter, pretended like insults didn’t bother him, like everything rolled off of him like water off a duck’s back, like a demon light bobbing into the darkness of an unknown night.

(“Oh, look over there! That’s one of the Yondaime’s guard. I hear they couldn’t get to him in time and watched him die.”

“Really? I heard they didn’t even try.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Look, that’s Gin Shiranui’s son. They’re all crooks, aren’t they.”

“I bet he just wanted the money. Was probably stealing from the Yondaime, too.”)

Konoha had an orphan problem, especially in the wake of the Kyuubi attack, and Genma Shiranui seemed damn determined to fix it by himself if his actions were anything to go by.

Well, he wouldn’t be doing it by himself, if Raidou and the rest of the tokubetsu squad had anything to say about it. Raidou would have to send out invitations for a packing-up day at their place and hope Aoba didn’t complain too hard when they ended up in the same building as him. He’d just get him a bottle of that good sake he always drank too much of whenever he was at their place and call it a day. (Though, putting Genma and Anko in the same building might prove to have disastrous results, and Aoba had always said the two of them were dangerous together. Raidou would have to practice his silencing jutsus for Aoba’s inevitable rain of “i-told-you-so”s.)

“Hey,” Genma said, pulling Raidou out of his thoughts. He raked a hand through his hair, pulling the shoulder-length waves off the back of his neck.

“Hey,” Raidou murmured back, heaving himself into a sitting position. His muscles ached in protest and he made a mental note to get Genma to help him through some of his stretches later on, after the kids had all been attended to. It was conveniently both of their day’s off, which, thinking of it, Genma had probably planned. “So tell me about the kids.”

Genma sighed heavily, and for a second Raidou wanted to take the question back for the dark, aged expression that fell over his partner’s face. Genma scrubbed a hand through his hair, chewing loudly on the lucky senbon that he always kept between his lips. Raidou hadn’t known him since they were kids, not the way Gai and Ebisu and some of their other compatriots had, but apparently that had been a quirk of Genma’s practically since he was born. It had gone from lollipops, to dango sticks, to senbon, gradually increasing in levels of danger over the years. Of course, Raidou had only known him as the man who kept a senbon constantly between his lips and had the strength and skill to spit it pinpoint between a target’s eyes from a hundred meters.

He’d been a little turned on the first time he saw it happen, Raidou wouldn’t lie.

“Two boys, Kotetsu Hagane and Izumo Kamizuki. Unrelated. Kotetsu is fourteen and Izumo is thirteen.” Genma started, staring down at the empty spaces between his spread fingers, hands resting upturned on his knees, expression familiar for the wanting of a cigarette that Raidou had made him break the habit of months and months ago. Genma was giving the details less like a concerned man with too much love in his heart and more like he was drilling the details of a mission debriefing, but Raidou knew him to be the former all the same. He scooted closer to his husband on the bed, leg tucked so his shin pressed against the small of his back and his arm came to rest heavily around the other man’s shoulders. Genma leaned into the touch, a sigh shuddering through him, wracking up his ribs like the keys of a piano.

“They were at the orphanage, but it’s been overflowing since before the Kyuubi attack. Found them just about hiding in the gutter on my way to the memorial stone, yesterday morning after you left.”

Raidou hugged his husband tighter. “Going to see someone?”

“Going to keep Kakashi company, more like.” Genma fondly, softly, knocked their heads together. They could have conversations in circles for hours about the grief Genma didn’t allow himself to feel and never get any further in the conversation than they did before they started. It was like pulling teeth with Genma, almost. One step forward, two steps back, and all. But Raidou loved Genma more than he loved himself, and he hadn’t known Genma this long, been this committed to him, just to abandon him when he drew further and further into his shell. They’d known each other since they were assigned on the Yondaime’s guard platoon together, had seen each other through both peacetime and disaster. Raidou wasn’t about to leave any time soon.

(Genma, sixteen, lanky and uncomfortable in his own skin with dark hair pulled back underneath a darker bandana and a yellowjacket ANBU mask. Iwashi, twelve, all acne-scars and impatience beneath his own mask, a red panda in shades of black and red. Raidou, eighteen, their captain, wondering why exactly he of all people was chosen for this position and glad for the presence of the jellyfish mask on his own face.

Sure, Genma was from the infamous Shiranui clan and had more than enough skills to back it up, and Iwashi had been among some of the youngest graduates the academy had seen that decade, had been chuunin for the past four years already despite his young age and Raidou’s own recent promotion for jounin; but Raidou? Raidou Namiashi, another no one, completely nondescript, just another face in the crowd except for the lightning scar hammered into his cheekbone and across the bridge of his nose? Raidou, who had dropped the mission reports when the his ANBU captain-- his previous captain, now-- had handed them to him and wished him good luck with his own team? _Raidou?_

Raidou, looking up into Minato’s smiling face-- because he’d still been shorter than him, then-- and feeling like he was staring directly into the sun. Like his skin was starting to boil and pucker again from the heat of it alone, just like when his family had been attacked by missing-nin wielding lightning jutsu on their way back to Iwa. Raidou, feeling both too small and too big for his own shoes as Minato looked the three of them up and down and said they’d make a fine guard platoon.

Raidou, nineteen, holding Kushina’s broken, bloody body as Iwashi tried in vain to heal her, as Genma stood just to the side with a wailing infant in his bloody arms. His porcelain mask had been shucked off his face and clipped onto his belt. Genma, who was no longer ANBU-Yellowjacket, who was no longer an infamous Shiranui, who was just a lost teenage boy holding the infant child of one of the few people who had been kind to him in his short life. Genma, who knew the most about children between the three of them but looked so lost, so afraid, so small.)

“Kotetsu just about took my fingers off when I tried to help them, though. Had to promise I wasn’t gonna take them back to the orphanage, as long as they promised to at least stay for dinner and to get cleaned up.” Genma sighed again, leaning back so the full breadth of his back was pressed against Raidou’s chest, against his stomach. “I think one of them got hurt. Like, honeypot mission type hurt.”

Raidou’s chest tightened so hard and fast he feared something would shatter loud enough for the kids to hear. He chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “Well, there’s no one better to help them than you, if that’s the case.”

(“Is that a kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that the _customer’s_ kid?”

“Yeah.”

“How did-- why did--”

“They hurt her. They didn’t deserve to be her parents anymore.”

“Genma, the customer is a _nobleman--_ ”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re dead. I killed them.”)

Genma snorted. Raidou didn’t have to see his face to know he was rolling his eyes.

“Fine-- no one better than a Shiranui.” he acquiesced, pressing a kiss to the tawny snarl that was Genma’s bedhead at the side of his head. “You gonna accept that, at least, you ass?”

Genma turned his head to grin up at him, rolling along the hollow of Raidou’s collarbone. “You wouldn’t’ve married me if I wasn’t stubborn.”

Raidou grinned softly, gently, lovingly back, “No, I wouldn’t’ve.” He pecked at Genma’s lips, hoping he could infuse all the love and trust and You Aren’t Getting Away From Me No Matter How Hard You Try To Push Me Away, You Traumatized Bastard energies he could into it.

“Now get up. We’ve got kids to feed.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so so much for reading! i really love the konoha's tokubetsu jounin, especially genma, and i've been trying to write something about him and his found family Forever. i hope you enjoyed this, despite my incredible amount of headcanons about the jounin squad and genma in particular. i'll probably come back and add to this some time in the future, but for now i'm gonna post this so i don't have to keep staring at it in my wips folder forever haha. as always, concrit, questions, and concerns are appreciated in the comments below! i hope you're all staying safe <3


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